


No Man's Land

by FortuneSurfer



Category: Justified
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Crowder's Commandos, Episode Related, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Fix-It, M/M, Nightmares, Resolved Romantic Tension, Resolved Sexual Tension, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-22 12:29:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21302087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FortuneSurfer/pseuds/FortuneSurfer
Summary: Boyd doesn’t start to believe in God, but that night he begins to wonder about the higher forces, and fate, and circumstances, like any man who has witnessed not one but two miracles in his life: a soul-saving departure of Raylan and his soul-saving return to Harlan.
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens
Comments: 11
Kudos: 46





	No Man's Land

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still beta-less and not fully functional, but I'm doing my best!
> 
> I love feedback and talking to fellow fans, so, I would love to hear if you like or dislike the story I am sharing with you!

1.

Harlan remembers the names of all children that were once raised at the feet of her hills, which is why the news about the rumored prodigal son that came back spreads rapidly like a water-born disease. It reaches their abandoned church, carried on the lips of one of Crowder’s Commandos, and it must be the one and only holy thing that has been revealed in this place in a very long time.

On occasion of that miracle, which remains unrecognized by anybody but him, Boyd postpones their mission in the black quarter, and it leaves Devil not too pleased because of the promise he made to his boys, but that Fandi’s temple can wait to go up in flames. Surely, everything can. Except, it seems, for their newcomer Jared. And it might simply be fight spirits of a recruit who’s all too tired of being green, yet it is decidedly not a question of his motives but of Boyd‘s trust, and when that boy spits out his complaints, he doesn’t know it, but he is already breathing earth.

Boyd’s whole cell is in disarray due to the sudden change of plans, but in that moment their puzzled dumb faces are much less real to him than the apparition in a hat, and Boyd autocratically banishes each and single one of them from the camp for the next two days without delay. He figures that if Raylan will be looking for him, it won’t take him longer than that to find his way to him. He doesn’t bother to give them any excuse, not even a half-assed one, but they’re a bunch of cretins, and so they do obey him nevertheless. Which is just the way it should be – you don’t get yourself a hammer to conduct with it.

Raylan came back, and Boyd wonders if that turn of events could be something he has long been trying to bring on himself with all his misbehaving.

*

Boyd gives Raylan time, but doesn’t give it to himself. He sets things in order – in the camp and in his head. He gets rid of the trash on the terrace, he sets up the chairs that lie in the grass in front of their trailer. Boyd’s acting out of basic respect for his future guest. He doesn’t hide the Dixie flag or the Nazi trappings hanging on the walls. No-no, he doesn’t want to pull the wool over Raylan’s eyes (as if he could do it).

Because if Raylan chooses to come to him as a friend, Boyd won’t lead him into their occupied and desecrated church.

Because whoever he will come as, Raylan is a marshal now, and to find Boyd, he’ll have to find out what associations are attached to the name of Boyd Crowder these days.

Because Boyd isn’t ashamed of who he had to be.

He would have been another kind of man if he had been given more opportunities. And who knows what kind of man Raylan would have become if his opportunities had been take away from him.

Boyd doesn’t see any sense in trying to imagine those men now. It would only make him angry and give him pain, he’s been there. And soon enough he’ll meet the only Raylan there is.

*

Their camp trailer is being filled with the divine smell of his special bacon with cinnamon as Boyd cooks a dinner for two. The second half of it goes to their camp cat when it becomes clear that Raylan has no intention to keep company to him that first evening.

*

Raylan is waiting for him outside. Boyd exits the trailer and sees his tall silhouette, standing knee-deep in the fog, but he has no time to see Raylan’s eyes before a bullet enters his heart.

*

…Boyd is panting in the darkness of the trailer that stinks of sweat, cheap booze, and weed. His memories about the military police only slowly disentangle from his latest fears. He’s still alone.

Ten minutes later, he is smoking on the stairs of the brightly illuminated church, its doors opened wide in invitation, and somehow feels like a keeper of an abandoned lighthouse. Boyd’s eyes are fixed on the darkness in front of him, and he does what he has forbidden to himself way back in the army: he starts talking to himself, pretending that he does not.

_„They took your anger _ _and yoked it to their plough. How can they act surprised when they see their harvest?”_

Then: _„You see, I wouldn‘t dare to doubt your life-choices, but at least I am commanding idiots and not working for them, now.”_

And even later then, after his memory revived the details of the shooting of Tommy Bucks as it had been covered in the evening news: _“If the situation was that dire with me, Raylan, would you do it to me? Would I be just another criminal __at the other end of that gun to you?__”_

Boyd doesn’t get his answer, of course, and it’s one of the reasons he had to give up these talks. He can’t imagine Raylan in all his complexity. Boyd hasn’t had a word with the man over the course of the last two decades, and as much as he wants to believe that he still knows the most important thing about Raylan Givens because he had known him for a half of their respective lives, he couldn’t answer. Not with any certainty.

And this not knowing inflames a rebellious feeling in him, which is nothing like the adrenaline shot in response to the triggered bank alarms.

Boyd needs to know, has to find out. He must test it. He will be Raylan’s first case if he’ll have to.

Boyd makes a deal with himself.

If Raylan will come to him as a friend, yes, then, Boyd will refrain from any provocations. But if fertilizer bombs and a string of bank robberies that have been something like a splinter in the AUSA’s ass will turn out to be more of a reason to pay him a visit that their shared past, well. They’ll show each other what they’re made of.

2.

Boyd is waiting, effortlessly doing the crossword and listening to country songs on the radio when a town car appears not far around the corner. He knows who it is like he knows his name.

Boyd lays everything down and walks towards the car, spreading his arms to show that he’s unarmed, to suggest an embrace. Whatever Raylan will prefer to think of.

The first thing he sees is the subject of universal discussion – and the hat fits Raylan marvelously. The second thing Boyd sees is that despite the car, and the marshal swagger, Raylan doesn’t have a holster on him.

Boyd laughs like a prisoner who can’t believe he just broke free. Raylan came to him as a friend.

He is wearing denim and flannel instead of a suit and a necktie, which Boyd tells himself he would have liked to see to feel envy, and jealousy, and annoyance because it could have been him – the one with the pretty marshal star, the fright of all federal fugitives. But the only thing Boyd feels when looking at Raylan coming towards him turns out to be almost parental pride. Raylan kept his promise to himself and became the kind of man he deserves to be. And he kept his tacit promise to Boyd not to forget the bond that they had shared in their youth. Boyd forgives him a half of the years apart that went into this deed.

Raylan’s eyes are all warmth, and he’s smiling in response to Boyd’s words of welcome, squinting in the inconceivably familiar attempt to contain _that awful wet sentimentality_, just like the boy Boyd used to know, and Boyd forgives the second half.

And he is fascinated to recognize his Raylan Givens in the man in front of him: Boyd can‘t get enough of every detail, documenting and loving everything he sees: from the facial hair to the incipient grey on Raylan‘s temples.

Having friendly patted him on the back, Raylan holds him by his shoulder-blade, prolonging the embrace just a bit, and Boyd laughs again, and brings Raylan closer again instead of letting him go. Raylan teases him, but his voice is tight, and Boyd feels, really feels like his soul has returned to him.

*

Some things have changed and others have not, and, in truth, it’s a good balance.

Raylan has forgotten how to drink a real ‘shine, and his walk is not the same, has more character to it now (which is actually not a drawback in Boyd’s book), but he is the same damn artist when it comes to evading any direct answers with the help of dry jokes. And he’s stayed captivating: a smart, stubborn, self-confident, and likeable asshole, the memories of whose grins and smiles kept Boyd warm in the army, no matter how desperately he wanted to blame him for everything. Boyd finally sees these smiles and grins with his eyes again, causes them.

*

Evening is falling down on Harlan when they dine on the home-cooked food outside. And the conversation they’re having is so light and breezy that nobody could tell they haven‘t seen each other in nearly two decades. But the content of their talk reflects that.

They talk about marriages and kids, about career choices and achievements, sentences and deaths of everybody whose name and face Raylan still can recall. There is something shameful in how they mostly avoid everything that‘s happened to them personally, preferring to stay on the safe territory of no man’s land.

Boyd appreciates it beyond words: Raylan could easily tug at any thread of a sentence Boyd produces and rend the fabric of their friendliness woven out of harmless gossip and anecdotes from the old times. But the closest he gets to it is when Raylan makes a joke about his new teeth.

Raylan has never been somebody with a compromise stance, and the fact that he pretends to be it with him now, sacrificing that cowboy marshal persona, fully answers Boyd’s burning question: Raylan wouldn’t shoot him, not dead, probably not even if he did his darnest to make him.

Boyd tries his luck and asks to take a peek at Raylan’s star. Holding it in his tattooed fingers later, Boyd comments with a smirk:

“You used to hide from your daddy all over Harlan, and now all Harlan will have to hide from you.”

“Not all. You didn’t.”

“Why would I?” For a moment, Boyd is absolutely blissfully unaware that they find themselves in a Nazi lair, his Nazi lair, and it seems to ease the tension in Raylan’s furrowed eyebrows and to free him from the urge to ask:_ why didn’t you, Boyd?_ “Why would I be afraid of a talk and drink with an old friend?”

It is truth, and like any truth said out loud, it changes something, subtly but irreversibly, for both of them. And later, because Raylan came to him as a friend, when Boyd recalls the picket lines, he doesn’t talk about the company thugs, or about the strikebreakers, or about the Jewish conspiracy, but about them – standing side by side at those strikes.

Raylan refrains from any remarks then, thoughtfully sipping from his glass, but Boyd can read him and feels that Raylan remembers together with him. And he sees Raylan lean in just a little every time Boyd touches his arm to draw his attention.

All of it makes Boyd want to touch Raylan Givens more than ever. Or more than he has ever allowed to himself to want to.

3\. 

When the skies are star-laden unlike in Miami, Boyd suggests to Raylan that they drive to their place at the edge of town. Take a six-pack with them, just like after the long shifts at the mine, with only difference being that the pickup would be his and not his daddy’s now, of course (and they don’t discuss the fate of his father). Raylan mocks him for trying to milk his nostalgia dry without any remorse, and Boyd is presumptuous enough to playfully quote Machiavelli.

They could drive to Audrey’s and possibly get into a fight there, but then it wouldn’t be a party for two, and Boyd wants it to be only about them and the best of Harlan.

*

In their place, you can still feel the movement of the world.

In front of them: the sea of lights spread between the hills. In their hands: Devil’s beer. The song of insects washes over everything, and night trains blow whistles somewhere in the distance.

At some point, Raylan confesses to Boyd that he had sworn to never go back to Kentucky and when they transferred him he told himself he‘d get out of here as soon as he can. And then adds that to break a promise you’ve made to yourself is a terrible thing.

Boyd gently puts his hand on Raylan’s and explains that they find themselves in a precarious position, for he, too, has made a promise to himself – to not lose his friend, Raylan Givens, for the second time if their paths will ever cross again.

Raylan smirks at that and shakes his head and suddenly decides to muse:

“I’ve been places. In the states and outside of the country. There is really no such safe and peaceful spot on the face of the Earth where no criminal could find a way to spoil things. Been to Europe couple of times, too. France, Italy. Even Czech Republic, imagine that. Met many people over the years – all sorts of people.”

“Raylan, are you trying to tell me something now, or just bragging about your adventures?”

Breathless, quiet, Raylan replies: “You think I’d forget the talks we had twenty years ago…”

Boyd could be a coward and joke about it, but he’s drunk not only on beer, and he did make that promise.

Raylan’s hat awkwardly slides to the side on his head as Boyd’s forehead touches it when his lips meet Raylan’s. Boyd invests that short-lived kiss with all the gentleness and carefulness he can humanly muster.

When he moves away, Raylan’s eyes are shut, and his body is tense, and Boyd knows the question Raylan wants to ask him but can’t voice because he knows that his voice will very probably break. Boyd caresses Raylan’s cheek and whispers: 

“You can trust me, Raylan.”

Slowly, very slowly, Raylan touches his caressing hand, and Boyd accepts that he will brush it off, accepts that because there is no such thing as absolution in this world.

But Raylan strokes Boyd’s wrist with his thumb, and kisses him like someone’s life depends on it, and _it is so_ because Raylan trusts him, and it makes Boyd trust himself.

*

Boyd doesn’t start to believe in God, but that night he begins to wonder about the higher forces, and fate, and circumstances, like any man who has witnessed not one but two miracles in his life: a soul-saving departure of Raylan and his soul-saving return to Harlan.


End file.
